Results released publically last week show that average SAT scores have decreased since 2008, continuing a five year trend. While the national math average remained the same, the reading and writing sections dropped by one point each.
Despite the negative trend, experts caution against drawing any conclusions regarding the state of education in the United States. “I just don’t think it’s a good gauge of what’s going on nationally,” said Tom Loveless, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy research center. SAT averages vary greatly from state to state, and when broken down by demographic, it appears that the drop is largely due to increasing diversity among test takers, over 25% of whom stated that English was not the primary language spoken in the home.
Two groups of test takers managed to buck the negative trend. Asian-American students rose an average of 13 points, and students with household incomes of over $200,000 jumped a whopping 26 points from 2008, suggesting that the key to a high SAT score lies in ones access to quality test prep materials.
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